Continuing the tour of fictional school shooters made famous from novels I stop at “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult. Most of her novels seem in my view to be from a female perspective and when I first saw this novel, I thought it would be from the mother’s point of view. I also was very intrigued that Jodi would write about such a subject. True, the mother’s point of view is definitely made known in “Nineteen Minutes” but you get the perspectives of others in the story; the police detective, the defence attorney, the single mother and her daughter who is the protagonist’s love interest but most importantly, you get the perspective of Peter Hougton, the boy who did the deed.

Like the other stories I am exploring, “Nineteen Minutes” starts after the shooting and then tells the story retrospectively. What I like about this one is that the story begins immediately after the carnage. You get the detective receiving the call of “shots fired at the high school” to which he responds. Detective Patrick Ducharme dashes through the halls of the high school noting and feeling sickened by the blood bath he sees and follows the trail to the locker room where he apprehends Peter before he is able to blow his brains out. The book then travels back and forth in time going back to Peter’s birth and the birth of Josie Cormier, his childhood friend, who later betrays him. Throughout the story you get a very good picture of the hell Peter is going through, starting at his first day of school where older children throw his Superman lunchbox out of the school bus window, to his awkward junior high school days where he is first branded a homo and finally to the point in high school where the bullying has become so bad, that he goes and does the act. All throughout the story, you feel a definite sympathy for Peter and part of you doesn’t blame him for what he does. The story ends with his trial where he is sentenced to eight life consecutive life sentences to which he responds by committing suicide in prison. The rest of the characters are forced to get on with life the best way they can.

Mark would have totally sympathised with Peter. He only had three years of hell compared to Peter’s twelve. Like Peter, he would have know what it was like to be out casted and picked on to the point of explosion. How you just want to hide so no one notices you and Mark too, travelled the school halls and streets of the town in total fear of being seen and set upon. Furthermore, he too, experienced being labelled homosexual but while Mark definitely knew he wasn’t, Peter’s experiences has him questioning his sexuality. Mark would have also been impressed with Peter’s planning and execution of his big extravaganza. He would have wished he could have made home made bombs to use a distraction and he would have also wished he had the computer know how to hack into the school’s computers and post the message “Ready or not, here I come” on every computer screen in the school. The damage Peter inflicts with what Mark would have called limited firepower would have also impressed Mark. Peter uses a 9mm glock pistol for his raid and though he has a second pistol and two hunting rifles as back up, he doesn’t use them.

On the flip side, Mark would have thought Peter very foolish to sit down and eat a bowl of cereal when there was so much to do. In Mark’s mind, this act wasted precious time and he would have seen in as the reason why Peter was taken alive. Something Mark was determined not to let happen to him. Another point is that when Peter’s computer game and music collection is discovered, he might have agreed with those who said that music and violent video games had an influence on Peter’s actions.

Of the three school shooters I am looking at, Peter Houghton is the one that would have had Mark’s complete sympathy. For like Mark, Peter went through total hell and saw the only way out was to go and commit such a dastardly act. I could see if the circumstances had been different in their stories, Mark and Peter might have been prison pen pals, each admiring the handiwork of the other.

In the last post, you met Mark Leversee, the main character in “He Was Weird,” who is bullied so badly that he feels there is no other option than to go into school with a gun and create carnage. As you know, this is definitely not the first book on such a subject and now that I know this, I live in abject fear that my story will be perceived as “just another novel about a school shooting.” So what I have decided to do is to take three such novels and put myself back into Mark’s mind and write about what he would have thought of his comrades in arms.

Two posts ago, I named the three books whose main characters I was going to look at and pointed out some differences between “He Was Weird” and those books. Although there is one that I deliberately missed out but I think it’s so obvious that it should be figured out with little effort. So now without any further delay, I am going to the first book, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver.

For those of you who haven’t read this story, it’s from the view point of Kevin’s mother Eva, who through letters to her believed estranged husband, tries to figure out in her own mind, what made her son Kevin murder seven people and wound two more at his school. The story begins before Kevin was born and goes through until two years following his massacre. We learn that Eva never really “bonded” with Kevin in the traditional motherly sense and we also read about Kevin’s continual defiance of his mother throughout. We know through the whole story what Kevin has done but we don’t really appreciate the details of it all until its shocking ending. I know, I could probably say a lot more about the book, but I won’t. It would be worth reading.

So, what would have Mark Leversee thought of Kevin Katchadourian? First, Mark would have been totally jealous of Kevin’s plan; the way he lured his specific targets into the gym under the guise of getting an award. He would have loved how Kevin cut off all possible escape and how he created the ideal “kill zone.” (A phrase I use quite a bit in “He Was Weird”) However, he would have been in two minds about Kevin’s choice of weapon, a crossbow. See, Mark learns his craft from a former marine and learns about effectively using maximum firepower.

Several factors would have definitely played havoc with Mark’s Asperger’s riddled mind. One important one was the lack of apparent trigger. Unlike Mark, Kevin was never bullied by pupils or singled out by certain teacher and he would have been envious of Kevin’s ability to keep a low profile, something he could never do. The fact that Kevin seemed to have no clear reason behind his shooting rampage would have definitely baffled Mark, who had definite reasons behind his. But of all the factors that Mark would not have understood with Kevin was the fact that after Kevin mowed down his victims, he stayed in the same room with them and patiently waited for the police to come and arrest him. He didn’t try to escape nor did he self terminate. That would have sent Mark’s anxiety levels through the roof.

Mark’s mind would have been totally overloaded by the discovery that before Kevin committed his act at the school, that first he murdered his father and sister. That thought would have never entered into his mind in a million years! Mark loved his family, even if he did feel that he was a failure in the eyes of his mother.

I thought that before I wrote about what Mark, the main character in “He Was Weird,” thought about main characters who shot up their school in other books, that it was prudent that I tell you more about him. On the outside, he appears to many as simply a normal boy, although the large glasses don’t do him any favours. Inside his mind however, it is a different story. Asperger’s Syndrome, like in so many people, causes him to make many social gaffs to which other children and a teacher pick up on and use against him. He has a wild imagination, probably even more so than what I convey in the story. Like with many Asperger’s sufferers, the dividing line between reality and fantasy is often blurred and he finds it difficult to separate the two. That is why he so easily slips into his fantasy of being a great ice hockey player and able to build on it to where his team becomes national champions. (Spoiler Alert!) Unfortunately it is also what gets him into so much trouble and makes him the easy pickings for all sorts of bullies.

In the first few chapters, his name isn’t even Mark, it’s Marvin. Why he’s called that is briefly explained in the story but his mother has his named legally changed to Mark because like Mark, she never liked the name Marvin either. It also doesn’t help that there is a cartoon called “Marvin the Monster” on television in the story and he is often called that. Children living in the town draw the conclusion that he changed his name because he didn’t like being called that. Therefore, they refuse to accept his new name and call him by his former name as a further means of keeping him down and after Mark does the big deed, it’s easy for them to use it to trivialise his reasons for carrying out the atrocity.

Other factors play a part in effecting Mark too. One of these is religion. Mark accepts Jesus as his Saviour, mainly because his mind is affected by all the stories of going to hell if he doesn’t. Religion and Asperger’s Syndrome do not make a good mix. This becomes apparent as he reads the Bible and becomes more religiously educated and although it does play a big part in the one chapter where everything goes right for him, in the end, it too becomes a let down for him. (Another spoiler alert coming up!) You see, in spite of his prayers, Jesus doesn’t cure him of his condition nor does he deliver Mark from those who torment him so badly.

Finally, the most important thing about Mark is that in many ways, he’s me. During the three years of my life the story is based on, I suffer many of the things he does. I also am convinced that I have Asperger’s Syndrome to a lesser degree. I had the fantasies he has in the story and also have minor rituals and obsessions which many find odd or weird. I got called both on many occasions. Therefore, I was able to throw myself into the character big time and as for religion, I did become a Born Again Christian when I was eleven and was a devout follower throughout my teenage years. However, as I look back on those days, I realise that that faith messed my head up more than any drugs or heavy metal music ever could.

Now that you have a very brief synopsis of Mark Leversee, you now have an idea of what eventually drives him to what he does in the story and hopefully be able to sympathise with him a bit. In the next posts, you will have his thoughts on characters in the other stories who also carried out similar acts. The next post will be what he thought of Kevin from “We Need to Talk About Kevin” fame.

Many people have probably taken one look at this book and immediately concluded that it’s just another book about the bullied kid who shoots up his school in revenge and we’re all supposed to feel sorry for him. Very true, “He Was Weird” does follow this vein but in many ways it is different. Out of fear of being accused of plagiarism, I have read four books about school shootings. One called “Rupture” by Simon Lelic, I will not go into too much detail here on Peaceful Rampage. Not because there is anything wrong with it, on the contrary, it’s brilliant. As it is about a school teacher who does the deed, I don’t feel it fits in with the context of what I’m trying to do here. The other three I will be looking at are:

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver

“19 Minutes” by Jodi Piccoult

“Endgame” by Nancy Garden

In all three of these stories, the story begins with the shooting having just taken place and all three work retrospectively in unraveling why the main character did the deed. It is not the case with “He Was Weird.” The story begins with the main character moving to the town full of optimism. However, as you read on, you get the feeling that it is all going to end up in tears.

With Jodi Piccoult and Nancy Garden, the main character has a few known bullies. While this is bad enough, in my story, practically everybody thinks they can have a go at the main character. Therefore, he is made to feel more isolated and more justified when he finally plots his revenge. In the case of Lionel Shriver, her main character is not bullied at all.

I also have my main character diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and a condition known as DAMP, otherwise know as deficiencies in attention, motor skills and perception. This is what makes him appear weird and I highlight people’s attitudes towards it and the effect it has on the bullying.

There are many other differences as well. For example, my main character, (hell, let’s use his name) Mark, becomes a born again Christian.Another is that I try to make his escapes into fantasy land as real as possible. There are more for you to discover as well.

For the next three posts, I am going to tell you what Mark would have thought of the main characters in the books I am contrasting them to. I hope you will come along as I think you’ll find it enlightening.

I am often asked why I chose the subjects of bullying and school shootings when I decided to write “He Was Weird,” the answer for me is quite simple.

Nearly every time I read about a school shooting, (Dunblane, Scotland and Newton Connecticut being the exceptions), the first thought that pops into my head is, “This could have been me.” Statistics suggest that seventy five percent of school shooters were victims of bullying and had I carried out a school shooting, I would have been included in that group. For three years, from the October I was in fifth grade until the same month of eighth grade, I lived in a town were I was bullied, humiliated and teased mercilessly almost on a daily basis and only ended when I moved out of that town.

“He Was Weird” is based on the three years of hell I suffered when I lived in that town, the difference being I never shot up the school. Many, but not all, of the things the main character suffers in the story, I suffered when I lived in the town. Although if I included every incident, I could have easily written one hundred more pages. I would have loved to have named and shamed the town where it all happened and named those who put me through so much misery, however, if I did, I would be sued. In that respect, the bullies win again. Saying that, I do leave clues to the identity of the town and individuals and those who wish to do so can probably figure it out. Unfortunately, for legal reasons, I wouldn’t be able to confirm it.

When I began writing the story, I decided right from the start to give the main character Asperger’s Syndrome and a condition known as DAMP (Deficiencies in Attention, Motor skills and Perception.) The thinking behind this is two fold: one) I believe that I have the conditions to a lesser degree. Having worked with adults and children with these conditions, I see myself in many of the things they do. Because of that, the second reason is that I strongly feel that more awareness is needed about them, especially as they go hand in hand. A major common thread with them is that the sufferer tends to think inwardly and become so caught up in their own little world that they don’t perceive social norms and their actions are considered “weird.” This makes them a prime target for bullies and other aggressors. Hopefully, this story will make people more aware and sympathetic to those who have them.

Finally, why wasn’t it me? Why not me? Even though I did move out of the town, I did have three years to plot and carry out my revenge. The biggest reason was that I had no access to guns or any money where I could go out and purchase them. Besides, I can’t think of anywhere, even in America, that would sell guns to a thirteen year old. Additionally, my experiences occurred back in the early 1970s. At that time, school shootings only seemed to happen in large inner city high schools and were almost always gang related. The thought of shooting up a school never entered my head. This is a reason why I set the story in modern times.

While I hope you all enjoy reading “He Was Weird,” I also hope that it will open your mind to the many issues brought up in it. There is much scope for discussion and debate and I hope the story is a catalyst for both.

I realise that those who follow me on Facebook will have already read this. All I can do is ask for your patience. I believe now that I am on wordpress, there is a whole new audience who need to know my reasons for writing such a book and that I am not just jumping on the bandwagon created by such noted authors as Lionel Shriver and Jodi Piccoult. I believe this story needs to be told.

If you are reading this, let me welcome you to my blog, Peaceful Rampage. The blog isn’t going to be a bad as what the name suggests. In actuality, the main purpose is to promote my new book “He Was Weird. I think the back of the book blurb best explains what the book is about:

When Marvin Leversee moves with his family to Ramsgate, New Jersey, he is full of hopeful optimism. However, the children of Ramsgate perceive that there is something not quite right about him, that he’s weird. From day one, he is bullied, humiliated, and abused by almost everybody. When his name is legally changed to Mark, it’s just another thing for them to bully him about. It’s also the case when he is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. His life is made a complete misery and anything good is either short lived or taken away. Furthermore, his mother, the schools and even the police seem powerless or unwilling to do anything. After three years of living hell, Mark goes to school one day with a couple of guns and does the unthinkable. When it’s all over, the questions asked are “Is it because he was weird or was he driven to it and who is really to blame?”

While promoting the book, I hope to explore the topic of bullying, which is something I have always hated and its link to school shootings. Furthermore, I will also post about the subjects of Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome as they too play a large part in the story.

So, I hope you will read with interest the things I will be posting here in the future. I aim to post once a week. I will be putting photos and other media on here to liven things up. See you all soon.